San Miguel

Reviewed by John Freeman

LIKE Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy, T. C. Boyle hasn't just invented a fictional universe. His books have become an ecosystem, and in each new work, landscape is the ultimate character. If a Boyle story takes place in a desert, there's bound to be a violent death; if in a futuristic world, a dystopian perversion. In Boyle's universe, Mother Nature always gets the last laugh.

So when San Miguel, Boyle's latest historical novel, opens on a sea-swept island off the coast of California, there is little doubt things will not turn out well for them. Marantha Waters, twice-married, childless and dying of consumption, didn't want to go to San Miguel. Her grasping, sheep-farming husband took her. And he's determined to remain until their shearing operation has made a profit.

Boyle is one of the most stylish, electric writers alive. Here, though, he sets aside all the razzle-dazzle of his tool kit to write his way into the heart and mind of a woman with diminishing horizons.

Advertisement

The chapters of this book are short, the events each one portrays consist of small gradations of the same - a traveller passes, a meal is taken, more blood is coughed up. Boyle's sentences have a woollen solidity. A feeling of claustrophobia sets in.

Just when the reader's patience has run thin, though, things begin to happen, events born from boredom. An affair upends the balance of the house. One day Marantha runs out in the relentless rain and collapses.

''By the time Ida found her - 'Mrs. Waters, ma'am? Are you out there?' - she was sprawled in the grass like a broken umbrella, chilled through and coughing so violently it felt as if her lungs had been turned inside out.''

It is impossible for a dying person to be unaware of the way we all go. Boyle expertly contrasts Marantha's growing acceptance of her fate and her husband's blind railing against the craggy island's seemingly stubborn refusal to give him profit.

Three stages of visitors come to San Miguel during the novel: Marantha and her husband; their adopted daughter, Edith, who ends up trapped there as a kind of prisoner in part two; and eventually a third family - a war veteran and a young librarian - arrives in 1930.

Each time the book leaps forward into another visitor's time it starts over, in effect. This is Boyle's second full-scale historical novel, and he knows exactly how to convey the past. It's about more than gaslights and newsreels; there has to be a point of view.

And so, with each passing generation, the women of San Miguel develop a greater degree of internal strife. They have not accepted their place on the island simply because that's what they were told to do. In their minds, we feel them fight it.

In the novel's second section, with war looming and modern life tilting at pell-mell pace, San Miguel takes on a symbolic importance. It is an island at the end of the world, a place of calm. Not a farm, but a retreat.

San Miguel is a book about the fallacy of more, of ownership, of second starts. It is also a prequel to Boyle's recent novel When the Killing's Done, which unfolded in the present day and lampooned how even preservationists try to assert their dominion over nature.

These two novels form a subversive secret history of the Channel Islands and their visitors. That's all we are in Boyle's ecosystem: ''… farmers, celebrities, botanists. All come wanting something. All leave, as we do, and the waves break endlessly on.''

It's a brisk vision and, in San Miguel, Boyle has delivered it in a tale where nature's violence is treated as a judgment, perhaps as it should be.

■ John Freeman is the editor of Granta and the author of How to Read a Novelist (Text).